Alfred Hitchcock Collectors Guide: Downhill (1927)

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• Not a murder in sight, but it’s still one of the darkest films in the Master’s canon
• The Wrong Boy: star of The Lodger returns to suffer again as the falsely accused
• Technically accomplished Hitchcock film, but uncomplicated Novello screenplay

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Downhill, Part 2: Restoration, home video and more Ivor Novello releases

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Contents

• Production
• More Ivor Novello on home video
• More Robin Irvine on home video
• Related articles

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Production

This is another extremely grim early turn from Hitch, focusing its unflinching gaze on public schoolboy Roddy Berwick’s grossly unfair fall from grace, being cast out into the wilderness and – spoiler alert – ultimate redemption. Hitch’s fourth film  was retitled When Boys Leave Home is the US, though When Boy Leaves Home would have been more accurate. That is, unless it’s a general screed against the dangers of sending your kids away to boarding school and the horrors that can befall them, to which I can personally attest. Although I didn’t get accused of knocking up any comely wenches, nor did I inherit a fortune, fall under the seductive power of an adulterous, gold-digging actress or become a gigolo to wealthy, dissolute older ladies. Unfortunately.

It’s based on a hit 1926 West End play, Down Hill (different spelling), which starred the prodigiously talented Novello, who also co-wrote it with fellow actor-playwright Constance Collier under the combined pseudonym “David L’Estrange”. It was partly a tribute to the stage name of Collier’s prematurely deceased actor husband, Julian L’Estrange, and though she didn’t appear onstage, Collier also directed the play. Novello and Collier collaborated on several occasions as L’Estrange, most notably on 1924’s The Rat, the Story of an Apache, which she produced and was also filmed the following year, this time by Graham Cutts for Gainsborough. Collier was also in Downhill’s nightclub scene (right) and had a much more substantial role in Rope. Apart from Novello, the only cast member to transfer from Down Hill to Downhill was Hannah Jones, who played the gold-digger’s dresser, making a screen début in her first of six Hitchcocks. She appeared in a total of 12 films in similar cameo roles, also including pivotal silent Piccadilly, and the uproarious talkie I Lived with You, also starring Novello and based on his own play. As far as screen appearances go, that’s not a bad little haul.

I’ll be honest though: Downhill’s plot, such as it is, barely qualifies as even wafer thin with holes you could drive a coach and horses through. One would certainly expect better from one of the Great British Playwrights. What’s more, there are hardly any wholly sympathetic characters at all, not even the star of the piece. The only ones who don’t display any personality flaws are a handful of bit players who aren’t on screen long enough to do any wrong. But even two of those are painted quite poorly: a stereotyped Black man and woman in Roddy’s delirium scene, cast as ‘simple Negroes’. Even worse, one is literally painted: she’s a blacked-up white woman. It’s not somehow germane to the plot, as in a similar example in Young and Innocent; they just wanted, ahem, a bit of colour and didn’t bother to get an actor who was naturally the right shade or even simply have her play it as white. Annoyingly and ironically, she is  the nearest thing to a sympathetic female in the entire film.

Conversely, the film is often incorrectly lauded for featuring a sympathetic “transvestite” in a role that’s not inherently derogatory, as one of the few folk who show kindness to poor, beleaguered Roddy. In actual fact, the “sympathetic” ear she lends Roddy is purely contrived to get him back to hers for sex. What’s more, her part is played by admittedly somewhat masculine-featured but definitely female Violet Farebrother, who went on to figure prominently in both Easy Virtue and Murder! A second instance of overt racism occurs when of the two sailors in the delirium scene, only the white one, actor Alf Goddard in his sole Hitchcock, receives a screen credit as “Sailor”. Meanwhile, the Black sailor isn’t mentioned at all; that still-unknown actor also appeared uncredited, natch, in at least The Ring and Champagne. There’s gratitude for you.

While we’re in the corrections department, many reviews wrongly claim Roddy is expelled for theft but they’re either based on poor quality, incomplete bootlegs or lazily copied from earlier, inaccurate sources. Sadly, such is the way with much writing and opinion on Hitch’s British work. The story makes much more sense, as does the father’s over the top reaction, if we consider Roddy’s crime of passion was more of the love that dare not speak its name variety. Reading the pregnancy as the, in the parlance of the time, openly gay Novello’s subtle coding of an affair between his character and his best friend, things suddenly become a whole lot more interesting. Perhaps the single most fascinating aspect of Downhill‘s original screening history is one which modern audiences can never experience:

“At one part of the film the screen projection fades out, a curtain rolls up, and without breaking the continuity, a scene from the play, as it was done on the stage, is actually acted by Mr Novello and his schoolboy friend. At the close they are summoned to the Head’s study, and as the curtain goes down the camera shows them walking down the cloisters dejectedly. This is an effective screen device and gives Mr Novello an opportunity of appearing in the flesh before his admirers.” – Sydney Tremayne, review in Eve magazine, 19th Oct 1927

Novello’s next screen appearance was starring in the superb, Alma Reville-scripted, The Constant Nymph (1928). Directed by Hitch’s British International Pictures colleague Adrian Brunel, it was restored by the BFI and is begging for a home video release. Brunel, of course, would later go on to write and part-film Elstree Calling before being sacked by BIP, who then asked Hitch to step in and finish the picture.

Someone who fared much better in her bit part was Sybil Rhoda who played her namesake Sybil Wakely, sister of Roddy’s friend Tim and an initial prospective love interest. She also appeared in two other silents prior to Downhill: Sahara Love (1926) and Boadica (1927), and she was interviewed here and here while still going strong at the age of 101! She can also be seen in “Starlings of the Screen” (1925), a Stoll Film Company promo short which appears as an extra on the BFI’s BD/DVD of Anthony Asquith’s brilliant Shooting Stars (1927). Unfortunately, almost all of the BFI’s copious extras are missing from Kino’s US BD and DVD, as with the releases of Underground (1928):

• UK: BFI BD/DVD (2013)
• US: Kino BD and DVD (2019)
• Mark Kermode’s review, clip | Neil Brand score review

Downhill has a reputation as being a bit of an anomaly for Hitch. Though showing occasional flashes of inspiration, it’s frequently accused of possessing mostly workmanlike and sometimes even boring, predictable direction. Many consider it turgid, ponderous, perhaps his least artistically successful silent and a likely contender for worst British Hitchcock. Pam over at Silent London gets straight to the point with the travails of Roddy, and it’s hard to disagree completely with the slightly tongue-in-cheek forum posters here and here, who all echo the general consensus. But the constructive criticism of C. A. Lejeune, longstanding film critic for The Observer, really nailed its shortcomings in her contemporary review.

However, I’m going to go out on a limb here in brief defence of it. I hadn’t seen the film for a good few years and was inclined to agree with the above viewpoints. On revisiting it recently in preparation for this article, I went in with my expectations suitably lowered and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the storyline is simplistic in the extreme and the denouement is unseemly swift and oh-so neat, but what the hell, it still gets to me. The ending reminds me somewhat of Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and nobody in their right mind is criticising that. My advice is to look on Downhill as a cinematic tone poem, where the overall mood is more important than a discernible, gripping narrative. On that level, I think it succeeds magnificently.

However, I will say this: the film has a distinctly dodgy message: no matter how many poor decisions you make or how far you fall, everything will be ok – as long as you’re extremely rich. And good looking. Spoiler: during the course of the film, Roddy blows a £30,000 inheritance, worth £1.5m in 2023, before landing back in the bosom of his landed family. But ultimately, Downhill‘s biggest failing is that it’s directed by Hitchcock. Really: if it had anyone else’s name attached and wasn’t saddled with the overwhelming expectation of genius, it would be considered a significant British silent, and one with few caveats. As it is, the bar is set so high for anything he’s involved with that it can’t possibly live up to it in most peoples’ eyes.

Even if you do turn out not to be a fan of the film, don’t hold it against Hitch: with dozens of solid gold nuggets to his name he’s certainly entitled to hit the odd bum note. Indeed, many of his films, especially those made under more compromising conditions before he’d consolidated his star power in the mid-1930s, turned out much better than they had any right to be.

As noted in Nick Cooper’s upcoming book, Tube Screen (based on his comprehensive website), “the earliest film to feature the Underground, rather than being Asquith’s eponymous film as is often assumed, is Downhill. Hitch must have quite liked the Tube as a location, since he revisited it in Blackmail, Rich and Strange (though mostly via stock footage from Underground), and Sabotage.” More fun facts:

Note Hitch’s use of unfeasibly large, high-ceilinged interiors throughout the film; foreboding and oppressive, they make the characters seem small and insignificant in their own story. It was a fairly common device of the era and Hitch employed the same trick to great effect in his follow-up, Easy Virtue, and perhaps even more spectacularly in Rebecca. But my favourite example is the atmospheric The Thirteenth Guest (1932), a little Monogram programmer with big aspirations starring a young Ginger Rogers. It’s adapted from the eponymous 1929 novel by Armitage Trail which, though based on a similar premise, pre-empts Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939) by a wide margin. As is the case with most early Monograms, the film is in the pubic domain and there are many budget DVDs kicking around but all feature variations on the same unexceptional transfer found on YouTube and the Internet Archive.

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More Robin Irvine on home video

I’ve compiled a complete rundown here of the survival and availability of all his screen works.

Downhill, Part 2: Restoration, home video and more Ivor Novello releases

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Related articles

This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.